A Teenager’s View on Life and Virality

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You see these words whenever you start to write on Medium. I stared at them as I began composing the post that would soon take over my life.

On January 2nd I published on Medium a piece called “A Teenager’s View on Social Media,” in which I surveyed briefly the apps that figured prominently in my life. The post went viral. I got inundated with requests for meetings and consulting gigs. In the months that followed, I have felt both the best and worst I have felt in a long time.

Today, May 6th, is my 20th birthday. This is a story of social media fame — all its triumphs and troubles, and the simple blog post that changed my life.

December

The story behind my post begins in late December, when I met up with Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat.

I’ve had an awesome relationship with Snapchat over the years. I first tried it out in November 2012, during the application’s early days. Evan’s cousin introduced the app to his high school in Orange County, California. A friend at that school convinced me to try it out, and I was blown away.

I was a reporter for my high school newspaper and I was about to launch a new technology section. I wanted to have an interview in the first edition, so I emailed Snapchat and asked if I could talk to anyone. Evan agreed, and we had our first phone conversation.

Evan and I have stayed in touch, meeting up when we could to talk about the application and update each other on our lives. Even though he has gone on to incredible success, he still takes time to chat with me, and I am incredibly grateful for that. At the end of our most recent meeting, I thanked him for taking the time out of his busy schedule. He told me:

“You were friends with me before it was cool to be friends with me.”

Little did I know that his words would end up guiding me through an incredibly confusing (but exciting) period of my life.

January

On the first day of 2015 I finished an online accounting class. I had been spending a couple hours a day on it in the preceding weeks, during my college’s winter break. When January 2nd rolled around, I suddenly had extra time on my hands.

Meeting with Evan had gotten me thinking about the public perception of Snapchat. Several news articles had just come out about it because of the Sony Pictures hack, so I could see what older technology journalists tended to think about the app. I had experienced some frustration trying to explain the concept of Snapchat to others, especially older individuals, because they all thought it was just for sending naked photographs.

This frustration (along with my free time) sparked an idea. I hadn’t seen a teenager’s view represented in the commentary around social media, which seemed crazy to me since we are the target audience for many social networks. Building off of my interest with Snapchat, I decided to tackle all of the other major social media networks in an attempt to “set the record straight.”

I felt reasonably equipped to tackle this subject not only because I was the right age and a user of social media. At times I even feel like an abuser of it.

I suffer from a chronic case of FOMO (fear of missing out). In both high school and college it prevented me from investing in one group of friends, because I was constantly worrying what a different group was up to. So I moved around between cliques, always being friendly to everyone but often ending the day alone. I felt like an outsider.

I mention this because FOMO happens to be the *perfect* description of many people’s experience of social media. People post photos of themselves attending parties and hanging out with friends, creating the impression that they are living an awesome life that everyone else should covet. Most of my friends don’t post when they’re sad or having a bad day. They only post when good things are happening, making it seem as if everyone is happy all of the time and always doing awesome things with their friends. (Selena Larson wrote elegantly about this tendency in “How to Pretend to Be Happy On the Internet,” it’s one of my favorite articles.)

I had such a difficult time in high school dealing with friends (or the lack thereof) that I often consumed social media just to see how much I was missing out on. I checked these networks obsessively, to reaffirm my belief that my social life was pathetic, and that people didn’t want to talk to me. Every single Snapchat, Instagram picture and Tweet offered more evidence that I was worthless. I never participated in anything, but viewed the social media results of everything.

Because I paid so much attention to how and what my friends posted, I became versed in the ways social media users express themselves. I began to notice trends that more passive users might not pick up on. For example, I became attuned to the timing of people’s posts, the kinds of content they posted, and which social media networks they were using. I spent years steeping in the collective social media consciousness of my friend group.

Around 10 pm PST on January 2 I finished “A Teenager’s View on Social Media,” and I posted it an hour later. Yes, I posted this article on a Friday at 11 pm.

“A Teenager’s View on Social Media” was the Most Recommended Story in January 2015 on MediumMy post went farther than I could’ve ever imagined.

On the day after I posted it, the article received about 300 or so views. From there it went to 1,653. It reached 84,640 on January 7th. And then the article hit its peak — 120,269 views on January 8th.

My phone buzzed nonstop with tweets of people sharing or discussing my post. I received more than a thousand emails from people who wanted to talk to me, either to pitch me their app idea, see if I wanted to join their social media team, or “just chat.” Here’s a small taste of what happened on January 7th alone:

The New York Times featured my article on their NYT Now app under the “Our Picks” section

I was awestruck. People were reading my work! I couldn’t believe I was getting emails from VCs and other people whom I had admired for years. This article struck a chord, and I was extremely blessed to have been the one to strike it.

At first the response was mainly positive. “My son/daughter does the same exact thing!” was a common reaction, as was “I’m a teenager and I totally agree/don’t agree with this” and “Wow I’m old.” But because this is the internet, the critical comments inevitably showed up.

First off, my age. For the sake of transparency, I had decided that I would reveal my age before the article even began. I said:

For transparency, I am a 19-year-old male attending The University of Texas at Austin.

Given that there’s no “perfect” age in the teenage spectrum, I didn’t think that my status as a 19-year-old would be a problem. If a 13-year-old wrote the article, people would complain that the behaviors of older teens weren’t represented. The same could be said of a 16-year-old in high school. But people jumped on the fact that I was getting on in my teen years.

(Note: The above tweet was deleted by @ow so it’s in a different format)

I didn’t know what to say. I mean, am I not a teenager? I am 19 years old. Nine__teen__. Yet some people seemed to think that my being in the upper teens invalidated everything I was saying.

That’s not all. The most up-voted comment on Hacker News suggested that maybe I was an influencer for Snapchat:

Trust me, with 300 followers on Twitter and around 50 followers on Medium at the time the article was published, I was the furthest thing from an influencer.

In hindsight I can understand the confusion. But at the time I was really freaked out that people were combing through my Twitter profile. Even though that content was public, having it examined still felt like a weird invasion of privacy. I quickly deleted the tweets about Snapchat (bad idea, I now realize, but I panicked), set my Instagram to private, and double-checked my Facebook privacy settings. I realized that now people would actually read whatever I put online. And that realization was extremely frightening.

On January 12th I woke up in a hotel room in San Francisco. It was 6:00 am, and I was staring at an alarm clock. My interview with TechCrunch wasn’t until 3 pm, so I’d planned to start my day with a tour of Medium’s offices, followed by lunch with Louis Gray at Google’s San Francisco office.

But I was nervous. A few days after my article became popular, Steven Levy, editor of Backchannel (where this piece is published), got in touch to see if I might move the piece over to Backchannel. He also asked if I was interested in writing a follow-up article to be published the following week — that is, January 12th. I was told by my editor that the piece would go live around 10 am EST (7 am PST), so I was up early, nervous and awaiting what would essentially be my sophomore album release.

I turned over to reach for my phone and felt that it was hot. I had 50+ Twitter notifications. I was confused. During the day if I didn’t check my phone every half hour or so I would collect that many notifications from people tweeting out my article. But at night it didn’t really make much sense. Then, I opened the app.

I began to read a lot of comments like Danah’s, on how I wasn’t speaking for all races or backgrounds, so I didn’t deserve recognition. Danah was very nice to me in her article, and in fact I agree with every word she said. I do not believe at all that I speak for anyone other than myself. That being said, Danah did say something pretty hurtful:

But I’m also bothered by Andrew’s depiction of Twitter users as first and foremost doing so to “complain/express themselves.” While he offers other professional categorizations, it’s hard not to read this depiction in light of what I see in low-status communities and the ways that privileged folks interpret the types of expression that exists in these communities. When black and brown teens offer their perspective on the world using the language of their community, it is often derided as a complaint or dismissed as self-expression. I doubt that Andrew is trying to make an explicitly racist comment here, but I want to caution every reader out there that critiques of youth use of Twitter are often seen in a negative light because of the heavy use by low-status black and brown youth.

I can assure you that Andrew was most definitely not trying to make an explicitly racist comment.

If I had known that my article would gain as much traction as it did, I would’ve cast a broader net. I would have included information on Twitter’s use in political/social issues. I would have mentioned that Facebook owns Instagram. And I would have done more research on WhatsApp. At the time I thought it was a dead application that no one used. I was obviously extremely incorrect in this, but I did absolutely no research for my first article. Even a simple search like “WhatsApp user base” seemed like too much work for my winter break self.

Danah ended her article with:

I don’t for a second fault Andrew for not having a perspective beyond his peer group. But I do fault both the tech elite and journalists for not thinking critically through what he posted and presuming that a single person’s experience can speak on behalf of an entire generation.

She knew what she was talking about, whereas I was just some kid who happened to get lucky and publish at the right time. She was courteous, but it all made me feel terrible. Especially when I was about to release my second article and be interviewed all day ab0ut it. I would have to spend the rest of the day juggling my attention between my in-person meetings and a possible PR nightmare online.

I felt overwhelmed. I wanted to stop publication of the second article and fly home, to where I felt safe. I wanted to go on a Twitter rant, about how no one must have read my very clear and direct disclaimer I had included at the beginning of my first article:

For transparency, I am a 19-year-old male attending The University of Texas at Austin. I am extremely interested in social media’s role in our society as well as how it is currently evolving. Thus, the views I provide here are my own, but do stem from observation of not only my own habits but my peers’ habits as well.

This article will not use any studies, data, sources, etc. This is because you can easily get that from any other technology news website and analyze from there. I’m here to provide a different view based off of my life in this “highly coveted” age bracket. That being said, I’m not an expert at this by a long shot and I’m sure there will be data that disproves some of the points I make, but this is just what I’ve noticed.

Instead, I took a few deep breaths and calmed down. My only comment on Danah’s article was simply:

The rest of the day wasn’t as hectic as I had thought it would be. But I couldn’t shake the thought that I didn’t deserve the attention I was getting, the good or the bad. The truth is I really didn’t deserve it — I just wrote the right post at the right time. But I managed to keep most of my emotions at bay. I had 15 minutes of fame, and I wanted to make sure every second of it was put to good use.

When I went to TechCrunch I was extremely nervous. I had no idea what to expect. Thankfully Alexia Tsotsis wasn’t nearly as intimidating in person as I thought she would be (she is actually really nice! ☺). I had a wonderful time at TechCrunch talking with her and touring the office. You can watch our interview here.

Me with Alexia during our TechCrunch InterviewAs winter break came to an end I flew back to Austin for school. That’s where Evan’s advice comes in.

Plenty of friends congratulated me on the article’s success. Lots of people who typically never texted me back or talked to me suddenly reached out and said hello. Numerous companies wanted to “pick my brain” for free and use my knowledge of the social app landscape for their benefit or profit. What Evan had said kept popping back to mind:

“You were friends with me before it was cool to be friends with me.”

My feature on the back cover of The Daily Texan, UT Austin’s Student-Run NewspaperFebruary

Back in the fall I’d planned a speaker series for my fraternity. The series was called “DSPeaks” and in the fall it had included speakers such as:

Director of Product, Data Products for Twitter (at the time), April Underwood

Co-Founders of Yik Yak (via a Skype call to an auditorium), Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll

CEO of Total Frat Move, Madison Wickham

I was looking to continue the series in the spring with a new batch of speakers. At my meeting in December with Evan, I convinced him to come to UT-Austin in March. I also had previously scheduled:

Editor of ClickHole, Jermaine Affonso

Co-Founder of Rooster Teeth, Burnie Burns

Because of the article, I felt like I should try again. I had heard about an application called Cyber Dust, the brainchild of Mark Cuban, and downloaded it. I wrote an article about it and sent it via Cyber Dust to Mark Cuban, telling him I was a big fan of Cyber Dust and would love to have him speak at UT.

He replied.

I was floored. It was unreal that I could bring such a big name to campus and have the honor of interviewing him in front of a student audience. We scheduled his talk for April with Tilt agreeing to cover the cost of the speaking venue.

A lot of people ask me how I got the speakers I got, even before the article was popular. The answer is simple: I kept trying. I emailed close to 1000 people over the course of two months. Sometimes I got the courtesy of a decline from a speaker, but most of the time I didn’t receive any response. At the end of the day, talent played a very small part in getting the speaker series together. The determining factor was the amount of work I was willing to put in to get the results I wanted.

March

Evan stayed true to his promise and came to UT early in March to speak. Our auditorium was filled to capacity, as were two other viewing rooms in which we were airing a private livestream. He was a great sport about the whole thing, even taking questions from the audience at the end of the event. I was really happy and feeling even more hopeful about the other speaking events coming up.

Me with Evan Spiegel on stage at his event at UT AustinBecause I go to school in Austin, our spring break is often lined up with SXSW, an incredible 1.5 week long festival focusing on technology, movies and music. Just before the festival I had my first ever speaking engagement with DigitasLBI — a “fireside chat” in which I fielded questions about social media.

It felt weird being on stage and the center of attention. I wasn’t necessarily scared of public speaking (I interviewed all of the guests on stage for the speaking events I held in front of large crowds), but I was afraid of being the one answering questions. I worried that if I said anything wrong it could come back to haunt me. Thankfully, just as it did with TechCrunch, my worries were much larger than reality. I had a fantastic time and loved answering questions from the moderator and the audience.

After that event I began my expedition into SXSW. The president of Digitas, Tony Weisman, gave me a day pass to SXSW Interactive where I got to meet with Penny Pritzker, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and the CEO of Daily Mail North America (Jon Steinberg). I met Biz Stone at his Super meetup, and he told me he had shared my article with his entire office. I had dinner with Mark Cuban. I couldn’t believe any of it.

Me with Biz Stone during SXSWA week after SXSW Dominion Enterprises flew me to Virginia to give a keynote speech on social media. I left Austin at 6 am, had a layover in North Carolina, arrived in Virginia at 12 pm, spoke at 1 pm, and was on the way back to the airport at 2:15 pm. I arrived in Austin at 10 pm, with a test to take the next day and some last bits of homework still to do.

It was apparent at this point that I needed to reprioritize my life. I briefly considered the possibility of dropping out to pursue a full-time career around some of the opportunities I was being presented with.

But I realized that a college degree still has a lot of value in the world. What if I took a job at a startup and the company went under? What would I fall back on? Or what if I one day wanted to pursue a job that wasn’t in the technology field? As much as it pained me at the time (and still pains me) to keep studying stuff like art history and government when I want to be learning how to market and develop products, I decided to stay in school.

So education should come first. I cut back on responding to emails and focused on my studies.

April

April: more opportunities, more stress. The previous months had really worn me down. Despite my attempts to prioritize school, I still felt behind and continued to put even more on my plate. At this point I was working three jobs while being a full-time student and an officer for two student organizations (including running the speaker series, which had events every two to three weeks) while also attempting to have some sort of tiny social life. The article created so many opportunities that I felt compelled to take every single one, even if it would be a burden on previous commitments or my personal health. I was getting four hours of sleep a night, on average. I felt on the verge of having some sort of panic attack.

I was tired and unhappy. And it showed.

My friendships suffered. I wasn’t spending much time with people I cared about, and when I did I mainly focused on myself in conversations. I became an inveterate multitasker, always dividing my attention. People noticed how little attention I paid in class and how often I was ditching out on plans or parties to stay home and work.

I didn’t know how to give myself a break. Whenever I finished a task and found I had a little extra time, I felt awkward. I’d text friends, but by that late hour they’d already have made plans. I’d find myself alone. A lot. In this alone time I would commit to yet more projects and tasks, and the cycle continued.

It took losing some really great friends for me to realize how much my stress was hijacking my mood and emotions. People would get frustrated with how negative I was all the time. I began to feel awkward in social situations that I normally felt comfortable in.

So I made a few drastic changes to my routine and social media habits. I have been going to the gym daily now since April to get out my extra energy. I set aside time for myself every night and weekend so that I can just relax and unplug. I’ve deleted most social media applications from my phone except the essentials. I have no notifications on my phone except for phone calls, texts and reminders. These changes have helped me focus on myself more and on the Internet less.

At first I felt defeated at having to take these actions. I’m sure lots of people cope with much more work and stress yet stay happy. I’ve learned I am not one of those people. Which is ok. No one judges you by how many Tweets you read or Facebook notifications you click on.

By the time of my event with Mark Cuban, I was exhausted. Despite testing all the technology ahead of time, we had trouble. The microphones didn’t work, so we had to talk loudly to the audience. The livestream failed, which infuriated the 200 people who had signed up to watch it, and who then sent emails and wrote messages on the Facebook event wall. It was heartbreaking to have spent hundreds of hours on an event, get all of my close friends/colleagues/family to agree to watch the stream, just to have the end result feel like a mess. But I had to stay with Mark Cuban on stage.

Photo by Bert McLendonDespite these hiccups the event went well and the attendees were pleased. Mark is a terrific speaker. Planning and implementing that event was life-changing. It gave me so much knowledge and insight not only into marketing and event logistics, but also into myself.

In particular, I realized that when things pop up that you cannot control, you have two options:

Obsess over the problem that you cannot control

Move on and do your best with what you can control

Before the Mark Cuban event, I almost always chose the first option. But when I was on stage, I realized that I had to focus on the second one. I’m still learning how to let go of uncontrollable issues, but the Mark Cuban event really showed me how necessary it is to stay focused on what you have power over.

May

As the bright light of my 15 minutes of fame dims to a flicker, I’ve begun to see that it wasn’t all just a fluke.

I realized that the issues I struggle with in my daily life — feelings of inadequacy, loneliness and never-ending FOMO — were why my experience went the way it did. It was crucial that I spend so many lonely weekend nights surfing through social media, gathering information about the trends and habits my friend group formed over the years. And if I didn’t have a habit of taking on too many activities, I wouldn’t have met as many interesting people or pulled off as successful of a speaker series.

I’m still dealing with the struggle of making and maintaining friendships. I’m still overcommitting myself to activities and learning how to manage my time. But a good first step is acknowledging the problems. Often it seems as if I’m scaling a mountain, slipping and falling on the terrain, not entirely sure of where I’m going but doing everything I can to continue climbing up.

Writing this post has been therapeutic in helping me recognize just how small these problems are. Sentences or bullet points you’ve skimmed through on this post may have crippled me for days at the time. But realizing that your weaknesses can be an asset — that they are just as much a part of what makes you, you — can be immensely empowering.